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Topic: Hotel Dallas - Documentary (Read 1007 times)

The long running nighttime melodrama DALLAS wasn’t just a cultural touchstone for Western audiences, who turned up in droves for much of its fourteen-season run. It was, strangely enough, also wildly popular and surprisingly influential during Romania’s dark communist years, when the country was under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. At this time, only three shows were permitted to air; two were state-run, and the other was the highly stylized and over the top DALLAS. Ceaușescu and his government believed that DALLAS’ revelry in excess exposed the evils of capitalism, but instead it captured the hearts and minds of the country. It certainly had an effect on Romanian born filmmaker Livia Ungur who is drawn to the way DALLAS influenced, and sometimes paralleled, life in Romania.